How to Travel to Mexico from Wyoming and Not Get There

I was going to title this "how people do new things and stay the same" or how the ugly American stays ugly or . . .
I just watched a YouTube video about a family, the Batemans, that takes a cruise from Long Beach to Santa Catalina Island to Ensenada.  The couple of about age 40, looking pretty intelligent and energetic, take their four kids on a cruise.  I wanted to learn about Ensenada because I'm going there, I think.

Where to start?   They started in Long Beach.  I learned that a) Long Beach is an 18-hour drive from Wyoming but nobody showed any scenic mountains or formations along the way, although there are plenty of them b) It has a harbor c) where you catch the Carnaval ship and can tour the retired Queen Mary ship that was forced out of transAtlantic business by air travel decades ago.  You can sleep on the Q Mary and it's haunted, and then you stand in lots of lines before you get onto the ship.
At Santa Catalina the ship is too big for the harbor, so you ride a tender boat in.  That, like the business death of the Q Mary, was informative.  The kids dipped their toes, no more, in the Pacific and wished they had brought their swim suits.  Oddly the last day they all seem to have suits?  Why would you bring suits on a California sea cruise?  We see some good footage of the island, a one-second glimpse of the mainland in the mist, learn there's a big nature preserve taking up a lot of the island, rent a golf cart and get some good views.  We don't talk to anyone else on the cruise or anyone else on the island.  We don't study sea life or kelp or whale migration.  Mainly we eat and try on hats at shops.

There are no views of San Diego or Encinitas or Tijuana's coastline.  Just like there was no talk about California, there's no talk about Mexico--we all know all we need to about Mexico and California already.  No explanation of the lovely climate or the intriguing sometimes ruined missions or even the Gold Rush or the Donner Party or Nixon and Reagan hopping from Calif to the presidency.   Doesn't seem like anyone along is interested in history or geography, either.  I pick those two because my sister came from that part of the world (northern Utah near Wyoming) and majored in history and geography.  

When we get to Ensenada nobody says if it's a big city or a little one, and nobody on the video bothers to ask to find out.  If it's in a pretty part of the country or has a desert climate, it's kept a secret.  No shots of the land around the city.  No real shots of the city beyond the pier.  The family walks into the center of town, looks at food, does some eating, does a lot of snooping around in shops and buying things, and is fast-talked into taking a horse-drawn carriage back to the boat.  Presumably this last thing involved actual contact with a Mexican, and we are shown the Mexican horse all right.  The son says he talked to several people in Spanish, but not more than a couple of "Espanoles" show up in the video.

The family does do some dancing and hand-clapping on board, but the main entertainment is food, which aboard ship was really great.  Clearly there are no fitness nuts in this all-American white family.  Nobody wears anything sharp-looking except when they dress up at night.  Their clothing is so regular and completely covering that I don't recall any of it 15 minutes after seeing it.   I know kids--theirs range from about 16 to 5--are notoriously hard to get interested in the world when you travel, especially after about age 11, but it doesn't seem like these parents are more than passingly interested in it, either.  None of the crowded streets of Mexico, none of the dirt, none of the expansive neighborhoods of Catalina Island merit the time of this videographer dad, who to his credit is ambitious enough to narrate the whole thing.  It's kinda like Wyoming is their whole world.  Reminds me of when I went to the University of Utah and we made fun of BYU.  My girlfriend, new at BYU, wrote that people were friendly and it was all sorta like a junior college.  We were glad she was, at an institution devoted to truth, willing to admit the truth.  When I got to BYU years later there was a big sign at the front, "The world is our campus."  Fellow students assured me "The campus is our world" more the story.

The closest our tourists got to sea life was a hungry unafraid pair of sea gulls.  They got great footage of them squawking. Also collected some small pretty sea shells.  The last day at sea the pace picks up with swimming, even by dad, water slides, and carioke in the evening with dad romping it with La Bamba--good show!  Also, they headed straight to Disneyland after getting off the cruise ship, which mom admits will probably be the best day of the trip.  Also, one of the small girls cries when the cruise ends, so she has learned to have plenty of fun along the way.  This is touching.

Why isn't anything else touching?  There's a plant going in, in Ensenada, to convert sea water to drinking water, enough to serve 90,000 homes.  Wanna give me the lowdown on that?  There's a big US retiree community and areas where lots of English is spoken.  Would those people make good tour guides if you worked ahead and searched them out?  On this video we only spoke English to ourselves.  There are two rather big islands in the bay off Ensenada where waves are big enough they have surfing contests, but nobody in this video seems interested in waves, islands or surfing.  There's some great scenery nearby outside of town but we don't take a taxi out to see the country.  Yawn . . . .  Neighborhoods, people, surprises, architecture--where's the next souvenir shop?

I had two friends from Tucson who took this three-day cruise a few years ago.  They showed me their nice photos but I don't think they learned a single thing in the three days either, except how to relax and gain weight sitting in the sun.  I knew nothing about Ensenada from talking to them about that trip, except the shops in the center of town.

Complaining and criticizing are not good for the soul.  I feel fairly crappy right now.  I guess I better go read Wikipedia on Ensenada.  I just opened the page and instantly saw three interesting views of the place, more than in 15 minutes of Wyoming video.  How to travel to Mexico and have it be less appealing than Disneyland, even if you're the adult in the group.

I don't know how to fit this in, but from their very covered up dress and their never swearing or even having a beer, I suspect these Wyomingites are from the Mormon side of the state.